Worlds of Weber Review

Booklist

The creator of Honor Harrington explains this volume’s heft by admitting that he likes to tell long stories, hence his many long novels and the fact that even his short stories aren’t very. The shortest piece here portrays an alternate John Paul Jones, fighting for the British; the longest depicts the peril and promises of the first cruise of “Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington.” Other entries show how treecats and humans learned to bond, how medieval archers saved a band of space-traveling Romans, how Bolos (the sentient tanks invented by late Keith Laumer; see Weber’s Bolo! 2005) handle ethical dilemmas, how an armored car crossing dimensions from Iraq can be a useful weapon in a magical realm once both dimensions’ denizens get used to one another, and how the United State of Europe of Eric Flint’s 1632 (2000) started acquiring a navy. Many of these pieces have appeared before in anthologies, yet they constitute a sampling of what a genius-level storyteller does between novels that is worth adding to most sf collections. --Roland Green --This text refers to the Hardcover edition